Traversing distances and differences: the African Women Playwright Network

In 2015, SA film and playwright Amy Jephta and I set up the African Womens’ Playwright Network via a mobile app to traverse literal, conceptual, historic distances but also explore differences in approach between artists and researchers from various parts of Africa, its diasporas and beyond. As a white South African, I had to navigate my positionality during #FeesMustfall movement that called for the decolonisation of universities.

In this paper I will trace how and why I set up this network, comparing online and live networking, I ask what we need to think about when creating spaces for artists and academics to explore difficult questions across cultural lines in postcolonial contexts. In particular, approaches I have taken to engage consciously with colonial legacies that continue to impact this kind of contemporary cross-cultural work. I also look at how we shifted the network from discourse on creativity to what Aristea Fotopolou terms ‘doing feminism and being feminist’ (2016:5), as lived and performed behaviours.

Prof Yvette Hutchison is a South African academic and theatre maker in Theatre & Performance Studies, SCAPVC, at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research focuses on Anglophone African theatre, history and narratives of memory, and how intercultural performance practices are challenged by ongoing postcolonial issues. She is associate editor of the South African Theatre Journal and the African Theatre series and has co-edited books with Kole Omotoso and Eckhard Breitinger. Her monograph, South African Performance and Archives of Memory was published by Manchester University Press in 2013. From 2015-17 she had AHRC funding to develop mobile app technology to create the virtual African Womens’ Playwright Network (AWPN.org), through which she co-edited Contemporary Plays by African Women (Methuen, 2019). The co-edited African Theatre: Contemporary Dance (James Currey, 2018) has led to her current collaborative project with SA choreographer Dr Lliane Loots in tracing the relationship between disability dance and citizenship with specific companies in various Africa countries.

Yvette will be joined by Zimbabwean AWPN-Warwick artist-in-residence Getrude Vimbayi Munhamo.

Host or Publisher Royal Central School of Speech & Drama